


Victor's Circle

by DGCatAniSiri



Series: James Vega Romance [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 08:49:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6072841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DGCatAniSiri/pseuds/DGCatAniSiri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beating James Vega's pull-up record deserves a prize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victor's Circle

Commander Shepard was many things. The child of two decorated Alliance officers. The sole survivor of Akuze. The Hero of the Citadel. Commander of the Normandy. The man who’d led a suicide mission through the Omega-4 Relay and come back with no casualties. The man credited with curing the genophage. The man who’d brokered peace between the quarians and the geth, despite three centuries of conflict. The man Admiral Hackett had placed at the tip of the spear in the fight against the Reapers. 

He was absolutely not about to let ‘backed down from James Vega’s pull up record’ get added to that list. 

He could feel his muscles beginning to shout and scream at him, but he’d be damned if he’d give James the satisfaction of seeing him back down from this challenge. He’d hit the one-seventy mark. He was closing in. Even with James offering commentary, he was determined to make it.

“Tiring out yet, Loco?” James asked, looking away from the punching bag and smirking.

“Not even, Lieutenant,” Shepard shot back. One-seventy-one. One-seventy-two. One-seventy-three.

His arms were beginning to burn. He’d come too far to quit now. One-seventy-four. One-seventy-five.

“Almost there,” James said, just on the deferential side of teasing. Shepard couldn’t afford the energy to flip him off. One-seventy-six. One-seventy-seven.

His fingers were slick with sweat. He couldn’t let them slip from the bar and lose, not after he’d gotten this far. One-seventy-eight. One-seventy-nine. One-eighty.

Shepard’s progress had grabbed James’s total attention. He’d made it this far. Could he really make it the whole way? One-eight-one. One-eighty-two.

And then...

One-eighty-three. 

“Ho. Lee. Shit!” James cheered as Shepard dropped from the bar. “You actually did it!” He had egged Shepard on all through the effort, but it was still damn impressive to see that he’d been able to get it done. “I... I don’t know what to say. How do you feel, Loco?”

Shepard was about to make a remark about doing another 183, but he couldn’t help a wince as he felt a muscle in his back scream in protest. 

And James saw it too. “You okay?” He would have made some crack about Shepard showing his age, but the last few weeks with Shepard had gotten him to recognize when that light joking was the wrong thing to say, and he could definitely tell that right now.

“I... might have sprained something,” Shepard murmured, confirming that this was probably not the time to crack jokes about Shepard getting old. “Don’t laugh.”

Okay, so, maybe James was trying to stifle a fit of giggles. He was only human. “Sorry, sorry. You know... Here.” He moved around Shepard and gently placed his hands on his back. “Lemme help you out, huh?”

Shepard would probably have argued against it, but James’s hands touched just the right place on his back to make him let out a sound of pleasure at the relief, a long, contented sigh. Suddenly arguing with a massage made very little sense to Shepard.

So instead, barely opening his eyes as James continued to knead his back, Shepard turned his head to James. “Should I lay down for this?” he asked, knowing how it sounded. James’s hands felt too good for him to even pretend to care. 

“Hey, this isn’t me tryin’ anything,” James said, though he sounded less certain than he would have liked. “Just... thought you could use some... help.”

“I didn’t say you were going to take advantage of me,” Shepard said with a grin. He knew exactly how the offer had sounded. “I just thought that it might be easier for you to work if I’m lying down.”

James awkwardly cleared his throat – this was getting hotter and heavier than he’d expected. Much as he wasn’t against taking that step with Shepard, had been willing to do it pretty much before the first date, he suddenly found himself with cold feet, a sense of reluctance to take that step here and now. 

As Shepard peeled off his shirt, moving to the bed, James watched him. There were scars on his back, which wasn’t really a surprise. Given what Shepard had been through, James was more surprised there weren’t more, though he supposed that was what happened when Cerberus splurged and rebuilt you almost from the ground back up. 

Shepard glanced back to him as he stretched out on the bed. “So am I getting that massage, James?”

James managed to pull it together enough to give Shepard a small grin. “You sure you’re ready for this, Loco?”

“No time to find out like the present.”

To start with, James stuck to simply kneading what he could reach easily on Shepard’s back. It’d be all too easy to make this one of those types of massages, and James had a feeling that, even with the teasing, at least Shepard wasn’t ready for that. And maybe he wasn’t, either. 

As his hands gently but firmly ran over Shepard’s body, he felt the scars that pocked Shepard’s skin. “Talk to me, Loco.”

“Hm?” Shepard got out, seeming half out of it. James liked that he could get that kind of reaction from him. 

“I know they say it’s okay to fall asleep during a massage, but... I like hearing you.” James hit a particularly solid knot, getting a hiss of air out of Shepard.

After a moment, Shepard glanced to him. “Talk about what?”

“Tell me about these,” James said as he ran a hand over one of the scars. “This is your victory prize, right? So tell me about getting through before.”

Shepard nodded and took a moment as James went back to work. “That one, the one you just touched?” He was referring to one on his back, about halfway down and angled towards his right flank. “Picked that up... on Arahtot. On Kenson’s Project.”

Since joining up with the Normandy crew, James had been granted clearance to look over some of Shepard’s more classified missions. Admiral Hackett had felt that anyone who chose to join up with Shepard were fully aware of the kind of missions they’d be asked to take on. “Read about that. Indoctrination, right?” Nasty stuff, that, and that was putting it mildly.

Shepard nodded. “Guard snuck around, got off a shot right as my shield were starting to regenerate, having just blown a YMIR mech. Before I could return fire, the Reaper artifact Kenson had pulsed and knocked me out.” If it hadn’t been for the Cerberus implants, Shepard probably would have been out for weeks and suffered cracked and broken bones, given the force of those pulses.

James’s hands moved over to a scar that looked more like a burn, almost like splash damage. It looked almost like thresher maw scarring, but James doubted Cerberus had restored any of Shepard’s wounds from Akuze. “What about this?”

“Grunt’s Rite of Passage on Tuchanka. The idea is that Grunt – any krogan coming of age – takes a team of loyal warriors to fight off some of Tuchanka’s predators, with just your wits and whatever weapons you can carry in with you. A show of superiority or something, I guess.” Shepard smirked. “They only tell young krogan to survive against the thresher maw. Speaking from experience, that’s a victory in itself.”

James almost reverently massaged the outside of the scar itself, enjoying the shiver it caused to run down Shepard’s spine. “Grunt didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who does anything in half measures.”

“You’re right. We took it down.” There was satisfaction in Shepard’s voice. James didn’t need to figure that Shepard had taken great pleasure in managing to kill one of them on foot. Payback for Akuze, for his lost squad, for every person in that group who’d either come home in a body bag or were nothing but a plague on a rock in a cemetery. James had an involuntary flash of his squad on Fehl Prime, Captain Toni, Essex, Kamille, Mason, Nicky... He shook his head. This wasn’t the time for ghosts. This was about him and Shepard, not echoes of the past that wanting to linger. Right now was the time for the living. 

James felt a sudden need to change position. Gently, he placed a hand on Shepard’s back, holding him in place. He then climbed on the bed to straddle Shepard. “Need some more leverage here,” he said softly, though really, he just wanted to feel Shepard in this position. Maybe he was edging towards something he was trying to hold back from, but he really couldn’t resist. 

There was scar tissue right around where his biotic amp had been inserted, near the base of his neck. Cerberus must have implanted him with a new one when they rebuilt him. James leaned down and lightly began to drop feather light kisses around it. That earned him a few more shivers. He smiled against Shepard’s skin. 

He pulled back and continued the massage, He kept at it for a good twenty minutes, letting the only sound in the room be his breathing and the occasional moan of pleasure from Shepard. When he was done, or at least as done as his amateur masseuse skills allowed, he somewhat reluctantly moved off Shepard. Shepard managed to roll himself over and up slightly, so that he could look to James while resting his head on a pillow.

“Thanks, James.”

James was about to wave off the thanks when he noticed another scar, this one on Shepard’s chest. He could recognize the distinctive pattern of an omni-blade. They weren’t particularly common yet, and James could only remember one opponent who’d been armed with one.

“Loco...” he said softly as he reached for the scar. “You didn’t say anything about this.”

Shepard squirmed slightly under James’s gaze. “It wasn’t important. The clone got too close. My shields came back up, didn’t realize he’d gotten through until Doctor Chakwas was looking me over later. She had it patched up in no time.”

“Still...” James ran his hand over the scar. “Shepard... You don’t have to keep these from me. You know that, right. Not like I don’t have my own scars.”

“I’m not hiding them,” Shepard said. “Just... don’t need to make an issue out of them.”

“You were hiding you were hurt, though. Even after it, you didn’t tell me. I’m not gonna be scared off by you revealing you’re human, just as mortal as the rest of us.”

Shepard smiled at that. “I guess it’s just as easy for me to forget that as anyone else.” He took James’s hand, twining their fingers together. 

“S’what I’m here for, Loco. I’ll keep you grounded.”

Shepard tugged on James’s hand and pulled him onto the bed next to him. James’s arms wrapped around Shepard in a protective hug.


End file.
